Didja hear the one about the new online music service….?
It’s Monday and time for another new music service. A new deal of this sort requires a media borg of the past to “team up” with a media borg of the future to try to figure out a way to sell stuff to people who are slowly beginning to realize they don’t have to pay for it any any more and in any case generally buy it from Apple when they do.
The new borg this time is MySpace; the borgs of the past are record companies, three of the four biggies, Warner, Sony and Universal, with EMI expected to join soon.
They Times story on this Very Important New Development is here.
WSJ here. The Journal says:
MySpace Music will offer free, ad-supported audio “streaming” and sell digital downloads that will play on a variety of music devices, as well as concert tickets, merchandise, and ring tones and other content for mobile phones.
The new service, the Times tells us:
[…] is also an attempt to encourage competition to Apple’s iTunes Store, which some music executives have criticized for exercising too much control in pricing and on other business terms.
As we have seen in the past, “exercising too much control in pricing” translates roughly into “stopping us from raising prices.”
What the companies want to do is do what they used to do: When they have hot new product they think they can get away with charging a premium for, they want to jack up the price. Because of the file-sharing neworks, it’s going to be harder and harder for the labels to do this.
But a company can dream, can’t it?
Still: HWTAA?
(How will this affect Apple?)
Steve Jobs does OK. The new service will sell mp3s, which are compatible with folks’ iPods. And other services are one watermarking or rootkit scandal away from self-immolation.
Most interesting is the tie-in with merchandising. It’s smart for the labels to at least attempt stick themselves in the mix with these (lucrative) products, though the stories are vague about whether these will be label-MySpace deals or done separately with the artists.
The stories say the service will open later this year.
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MySpace is just showing it’s true colors. They have pretended to be about indy artists, but they’re not, and the labels just want to get at MySpace’s user base. They want to be free to do their subscription services and royalty-raking on their own terms, and MySpace, i.e., Fox, is prepared to let them. It’s pathetic, and it won’t work. For either of them.
This is a blatant attempt on the part of the labels to raid what was ostensibly a home for independent artists, but it shows how desperate they are to maintain their declining market power. And the fact that MySpace is willing to let them raid their user base shows that MySpace is not really serious about the independent market. So where does that leave the artists on MySpace, who will now have to cut through even more distractions as the majors spam and shill their artists all over the site? It’s looking bad for MySpace, in my opinion. Whether this is a competitor for iTunes or not is not the point. It’s understood that the labels don’t like Apple’s deal, they’re greedy and want to charge more money for their subpar product. That’s normal for them. What matters is that this changes nothing for the artists or the fans, and it may even be worse for both.